OnePlus Buds Pro 3

There are seemingly a trillion wireless in-ears on the market, and OnePlus realised a long time ago that there are a lot of customers looking to snag a pair for around £170.

The new {Buds Pro 3} start off strong; there's a black version, but ours were "Lunar Radiance", with an off-white leather-like material covering on the case and a golden metal accent adding a bit of flair. It's opulent, art deco-esque and downright pompous. It's a little too much for me, but I have to admit that it looks incredible. The style is maintained on the units themselves, with the rubber part coloured cream and an almost exaggerated polished aluminium finish for the stem, while it looks like the black is a more subtle anodised finish.

There's Bluetooth 5.4, so there's low latency mode for gaming, {Google Fast Pair} and a pretty solid 42+ hours of battery life, something you quickly realise in practice that number comes from when ANC is deactivated. I got a grand total of 27-28 hours from one charge, equivalent to one charge a week, which I can easily survive, especially with Qi wireless charging enabled. In addition, there's dual-pairing, which is actually amazingly convenient, and perhaps more importantly, there's 50dB noise cancellation, which while it may be adaptive, it works. OnePlus promises effective reduction of voices in particular, and as someone who commutes by train on a daily basis, I have to say that they deliver. There are four sizes of silicone ear tips included, so it should be possible to find a size that fits most people.

The sound is tuned by Danish Dynaudio, which has a solid share of the studio gear market, but they are probably best known for their beautiful wooden speakers and not least for being among the first to make nice active wireless speakers for home use and being among the best to combine modern wireless standards with traditional Hi-Fi. Each unit has its own DAC and there are two separate units: a 6mm tweeter and an 11mm woofer. The woofer has a double-stacked magnet and is made from a ceramic composite material, and the tweeter has a flat voice coil, and by flat we mean that it is 35 micrometres. I don't know if we have Dynaudio to thank for this, but it works.

Controls are found directly on the stem of the in-ears, and it's pretty straightforward. However, I will say that while tapping works fine and sliding up and down to adjust the volume is effective, the resistance of the finger against the surface also makes it a slightly variable experience. Sometimes your finger just doesn't slide up and down very easily and then it suddenly doesn't work, which can be problematic in everyday use. Beyond that, the rest is done via the OnePlus' HeyMelody app. It's easy and functional, with an intuitively designed GUI. It also gives you a personalised sound (according to OnePlus that is; it didn't make much of a difference to me) but it's hard to prove this without highly competent and expensive measuring equipment.

The audio quality is on paper 24-bit/192 kHz, with LHDC 5.0 and support for up to 1 Mbps. However, I'm quite annoyed that they don't support LDAC or any kind of AptX, AptX HD or Lossless, as that would have been the icing on the cake. On the other hand, there are good tuning options in the HeyMelody app, but that doesn't change the fact that I can in no way fully utilise the high-res files streamed over {Tidal}.

Call quality is pretty high as OnePlus is now using AI to improve things via the three built-in microphones, but unsurprisingly there's also a voice pick up bone sensor, or bone conductor, which helps. We've seen headsets built on the bone-conducting principle before but never found it particularly good, but in this context, where it's used as part of an overall package, it seems to have found its niche.

The sound is surprisingly dynamic and very clear. I would have liked a bit more slam and punch in the midrange, but that doesn't change the fact that it's one of the best I've heard. However, critical listening is limited by the lack of real support for common high-res codecs. The sound is reasonably balanced; the bass is deep, very deep, but it's not artificially boosted so it doesn't drown out the rest of the soundstage. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the sound quality puts the {OnePlus Buds Pro 3} in my personal top five, but that makes the lack of better resolution even sillier, because then we'd be talking top two or top three. But the dynamics here are so good that it's hard to beat them on their own.